Friday, January 29, 2016

The politician on the right cut off a long-winded speaker's prayer -- at worst a rude act, while at best an appropriate and well-deserved maneuver. He is named explicitly as a Republican, twice, just in the article's headers.

Meanwhile, the "corrupt" Chicago "city official" on the left "faces years in prison" for his corruption involving "the administration" of the City of Chicago. His known behavior is infinitely worse than that of the first official, yet hispolitical party is not mentioned at all in the headline. In fact, even in the article, his political party is not mentioned. Not mentioned either is the political party to which everyone in the "administration" of the City of Chicago belongs. Apparently the Brits at the Daily Mail don't realize that every educated American over 21 years old knows that Chicago has been in the tight grip of the Democrat Party for generations and that every "city official" and every single person in the city's "administration" is a Democrat. But for the Daily Mail that's a fact not worth mentioning, and they're too ignorant of American politics to know everyone would be on to their subterfuge. They only look pathetic in their failed manipulation. But should a Republican allegedly be rude, well, he must be called out.

As I pointed out in a previous post on the Daily Mail, this tactic appears to involve a begrudging coverage of a Democrat scandal that leaves out the Democrat part, juxtaposed with an article about some Republican peccadillo that emphasizes the Republican part, all in an effort to mislead inattentive and unsuspecting readers into thinking that both articles involved Republicans.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

The primary voting season is
about to start, and this time around the big picture in presidential politics is
as unstable and threatening and infuriating as at any time in my life.

Democrat party leaders see
voters as puppets who must be ruled and see themselves as the puppet masters to
do just that. For would-be dictators, power is the ultimate
goal, and corruption along the way is a feature, not a bug.Just look at any city (try Chicago) or state (how
about Illinois) that has been solidly in the grip of Democrats for a long time.Corruption oozes from every pore.Now comes Hillary Clinton, from Illinois no
less and an acolyte of the late Chicago communist agitator-extraordinaire Saul
Alinsky.From all we already know of her,
from Whitewater and the Rose law firm and cattle futures, to the
illegal, unsecured private server set up to escape legal controls and proper oversight, and up through the Clinton
Foundation, by every honest and rational analysis carefully arranged to launder
bribes to the sitting United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is the
most personally corrupt major politician in American history. And an inveterate liar to boot. Yet she leads Democrat party polling for the
nomination for president.This is
end-of-the-Republic stuff.

Among Republican voters,
maverick Donald Trump maintains his big lead.Although certainly not of consistent conservative views and not even a
consistent Republican, he is spot on right now about the biggest issue at hand
– open borders and amnesty for illegals that threaten American wages now and
promise to erode them for generations.As I have written before, Democrat leaders want open borders to gain more
Democrat voters, and they figure the workers who support them blindly will stay
blind.The Republican Party elites,
funded by business interests, want open borders to access a bottomless cup of
cheap labor (and who cares if they're more Democrat voters who will bury the principles for which the Republican Party is supposed to stand).The American workers get screwed.

And so Trump has caught on with many Republican voters who
see him as the repudiation of the Quisling leaders of their party.A very flawed vessel for that message, to be sure, but an
effective one as it has turned out.The party that has in the
last 15 years exploded budgets, that has sent thousands of brave and loyal Americans to die in
fruitless and thankless and endless conflicts in the Muslim world, that has
enlarged big government beyond all anticipations via such affronts as the Homeland
Security Department, the federal takeover of education, and the
recent detestable "Cromnibus" bill, that has voted overwhelmingly for every radical liberal supreme court nominee – the very party leaders who brought us all that and much more now scream “trust us, not Trump! And not Cruz either! They're dangerous!”Those same party leaders, from Boehner and McConnell,
from GW Bush and John McCain, to such men now as Speaker Ryan (my how he
has disappointed) and ¡Jeb!, are happy to share in the gravy train racket
that is big government and will cooperate with Democrats in destroying free men
and women who reject that racket, as they force through their huge, impenetrable
bills that hide all kinds of political mischief and that surreptitiously fund
all the perfidy, like Obamacare and open borders, they publicly profess to oppose.

I’m drawn to those liberty-lovers whom these feckless
Republican leaders truly fear and to those who have been strong and consistent in their advocacy for the politics of liberty, constitutional government, and the rule of law fairly and equally enforced.I’m for Cruz.

Friday, January 15, 2016

At the wonderful temporary exhibit The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander at the Field Museum in Chicago -- an extensive display of artifacts from pre-Classical and Classical Greece. There are maps and explanatory text aplenty, though not quite up to the quality and quantity shown in the Field's large permanent exhibit on China -- but still very well-done all the same.

Left to right: Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes. All three are Roman copies of now-lost Greek originals, 4th Century BC, from the collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

A stele which marked graves of wealthy citizens, from the 4th century BC, courtesy of the Archaeological Museum of Pella [Greek Macedonia].

Statue of Hoplite known as Leonidas, the Spartan king of Thermopylae fame. From the Acropolis of Sparta, 5th Century BC, now at the Archaeological Museum of Sparta.

A remarkable display of objects mostly on loan from Greece. Well worth a visit to the treasure that is the Field.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

From memory, an exchange in Mel
Brooks’s History of the World, Part I goes
something like this:Lackey to the French king at the start of
the French Revolution:“Sir, the
peasants are revolting;” King: “Boy, you can say that again, they sure are.” The other day the elites of the Republican
Party broadcast a response to Obama’s State of the Union address, a response
that by many reports didn’t hit Obama’s record and policies very hard.But what the Republican elite response did do
was slam leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters
as “angry voices” and admonished them to, in so many words, basically shut up
and go along with the Democrat-lite program of new Republican Speaker Paul Ryan
(BFF of radical open border Democrat Rep. Luis Gutierrez) and the Republican
establishment.The program that prominently
includes open borders to immigrants.

Open borders to basically any and all immigrants, a point we seem to be halfway to already, would for generations depress
wages, already stagnant, for low- and medium-skilled workers in the United
States.Trump’s
opposition to open borders and calls for tighter controls on immigration
explains his strong support among blue collar workers, traditionally Democrats,
even among blacks and Hispanics who understand the deleterious impact more immigration
will have on their jobs and wages.The Democrats
want open borders to gain more Democrat voters, and they figure the workers who
support them blindly will stay blind.The
Republican party elites, funded by business interests, want open borders to
access a bottomless cup of cheap labor.The
American workers get screwed and they’re rightfully “angry” about that. Those “Reagan Democrats” who now see clearly what's going on want to return to the
Republican party, but Paul Ryan and the elites of Republican party don’t want
them.They’d rather have Hillary Clinton,
corrupt to the bone, with open borders and cheap labor.Republican elites would be happy to “pay to
play” with Hillary – they think they can make a lot of money with her and her
crowd; with Donald Trump and the “angry voices” of his supporters, not so much.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Last evening the Lyric Opera
of Chicago presented Placido Domingo, Ana Maria Martinez, and the Lyric
Orchestra in concert to a packed house.Though
Domingo’s voice is not quite what it once was, he is still wonderful to see and
hear, still touring and performing at 74 years old.Martinez is well-known at the Lyric, and I
had the good fortune in recent years to catch her as Mimi in La Boheme(link) and at a
Stars of the Lyric late-summer outdoor concert (link).The concert was a
bit subdued emotionally and at times a touch perfunctory, but the audience loved
it.Special was the beautiful
baritone-soprano duet from La Traviata,
where the thirty or so year difference between the singers perfectly matched the storyline.Other highlights for me included the love
duet from The Merry Widow and “Tonight”
from West Side Story.The Lyric Opera Orchestra performed a number
of pieces alone, including the rousing overture from Verdi’s La forza del destino.

Domingo’s solos included
Lehar’s “Dein Ist Mein Ganzes Herz” and Torroba’s “Amor, Vida De Mi Vida”, both
of which he sang long ago in Three Tenors concerts, and arias from Andrea Chenier and Macbeth.Martinez’s program
included an aria from Ernani and “If
I Loved You” from Carousel.They concluded their encore set with a pleasant
surprise, at least to me – a two-part rendering of the De Curtis Neapolitan song “Non Ti
Scordar di Me,” which is as moving and melodic as the composer’s much more well-known
“Torna a Surriento.”The city is fortunate
to have the Lyric.In all a wonderful
way to spend a cold winter evening in Chicago.